“Lee Wallace and Kenny Miller gave us that and we installed a style of play that worked for us and we had really good success. We got promoted, beat Celtic in the semi-final , we lost to Hibs unfortunately in the final.

“Then we were going into a new season and the expectations all of a sudden were ‘We’re going for 55, we’re going to win the league’.

“We had to recruit; we had to improve the squad. We had a young squad that actually needed help to even be competitive in that league.

“So we brought in a few players, it didn’t quite work out. Obviously Joey [Ban], you know. We signed Joey, he was the best Championship midfielder that season. It didn’t work out at Rangers for whatever reason.

“We signed Jordan Rossiter who was, in my mind, the best young English midfielder at that age. He got injured, that didn’t quite work out. We signed Niko Kranjcar who got injured as well.

“So it just seemed like things didn’t quite work out for in terms of how quickly people expected us to be where they felt they needed us to be.

“The expectations were really high and we didn’t meet those expectations quickly enough for a lot of people.

“You always think you can win the league but if you look at it objectively what right have Rangers coming back in to the Premiership having not been there for five years with, no disrespect to the lads we had in the squad, how can that team be expected to win the league?

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“And Celtic had improved. They realised that we had made some good signings by everybody’s accounts account at the time and Celtic reacted to that by bringing in a top class manager and some top class players.

“They reacted to the sort of challenge we brought to them so the gap had become even bigger so we had to try bridge that gap and it was really difficult.

“With hindsight, it was never going to be achievable in that first season and as its shown now there’s still a gap there and I’m not sure it’s closed even now.”